So much for that movie magic. We were on Terminal Island, part of the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and the place where the final minutes of The Fast and the Furious were filmed. In that scene, a street racer and his undercover-cop nemesis engage in a quarter-mile race that finishes with both cars barely beating a speeding train across an intersection. This being the real world, however, our situation was different. To start with, the train had beaten us to the intersection, rather than the other way around, and it was in the process of slowing to a dead halt. Until this train resumed its motion, we weren’t going anywhere. “This road is not fast,” I said, “and it’s making me furious.”